They Paved Richmond Heights to Put Up a Menards Parking Lot

There’s something different about a home being demolished. It’s an emotional experience to see a place where a family has celebrated holidays and birthdays, a place where children have been welcomed into the world, and eventually thrust back into it, pulled apart. It’s a unique voyeurism to peer in at wallpaper, or a bedroom door of a half-gone home. One cannot help but feel that more than brick and mortar are being destroyed.

This is true of a solid home in Clayton being sacrificed for new infill three times the size and price tag. It’s true of the many vacant shells that fall in the City of St. Louis each year. Both are commonplace to the point of being unremarkable. It’s altogether different when it’s not one home, but an entire neighborhood, a community, being erased.

It’s different, even in St. Louis where demolition is omnipresent. Warehouses, office buildings, churches, hospitals and storefronts being dismantled or simply crumbling, are part of urban life. We become desensitized by this incessant slog. But then sometimes something is different.

That different feeling is what one experiences seeing the last days of a small corner of Richmond Heights. Hadley Township isn’t an historic name, but rather one residents used for their nascent neighborhood association nearly 15 years ago now. That group sought to stabilize the neighborhood, and asked the city for help.

Housing in the neighborhood dates back as far as 1907, and the area was first a company town for Evans & Howard Firebrick Company. Most of the residents were African-Americans who had migrated north for jobs. For many years it was the only place black residents could rent or buy a home outside the City of St. Louis limits. Family histories spanned generations here.

So residents asked for help. Richmond Heights issued two requests for proposals (RFPs) asking for residential infill development. They received exactly zero proposals. But no matter, word was out, and investors were buying homes. With the redevelopment buzzard circling, some residents asked the city to help find a redevelopment plan even if it meant selling their homes.

In the end, just more than 100 properties were purchased. Along the way there were developers and more developers, plans and more plans. Hotels, high-end residential and office space, a Major League Soccer stadium, and then big box retail. If it weren’t for a holdout, or two, Richmond Heights would be home Missouri’s only IKEA. That store would eventually land in the City of St. Louis.

Before abandoning its redevelopment plan, Pace Properties had offered homeowners living in the area $50,000 plus 2.4 times the appraised home value as determined by St. Louis County. The minimum buyout offer was $190,000, according to Pace. Buyout numbers for the Menards site have not been made public.

Pace and the IKEA may be gone, but developers can and will continue to pursue development in the area, they simply will not have the explicit assistance of the city in doing so. The remaining homes are now more isolated than ever, and will remain targets for redevelopment.

The Menards development is rushing forward. In September last year a $15M Tax Increment Financing subsidy was approved. The money will be used to purchase and demolish homes, then build infrastructure for the 246,000sf store.

The development area was blighted in 2006, and for a second time in 2013. If you’re not familiar, blighting studies are demolition-enabling stamps of approval. At a basic level, a blighted property is one that is “failing to contribute to the economic and fiscal well being of the City”. Maybe the layman’s term is “eyesore”, as it is a relative judgement.

By 2013, the blighting study found 30 of 74 single family homes, and two three-family buildings vacant. Nearly 76% of the buildings in the Area were constructed prior to 1963. The area was “obsolete”: Nearly 48% of all parcels in the Area are either vacant (primarily due to demolitions of dilapidated buildings) or contain vacant buildings, and are therefore no longer supporting viable development. The obsolete infrastructure was determined to not support “modern residential or commercial development.”

The several dead-end streets were determined to be dangerous because emergency vehicles would have a difficult time turning around. Missing or neglected sidewalks inhibited pedestrian circulation and weren’t in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The parcels are too small to meet current zoning standards (which require larger homes on larger lots).

Ultimately, though, no one cares about that stuff, it’s just part of the blighting pro forma. After all, those shortcomings are about to be replaced with a dehumanizing box. The problem was the area had become an “economic liability”, it was “underutilized”, “a burden on the city.” It was practically unbecoming of a municipality such as Richmond Heights.

I enjoy the analytic argument. If running a city were strictly a bottom line game, a constant play for more sales tax revenue, it would be easy to understand why this neighborhood is now gone. And maybe that’s in fact what it is, but it shouldn’t be. Our values, as codified in financial incentives, are badly distorted.

Richmond Heights will reap tax revenue, and well in excess of the TIF. But the Big Lie is that everyone wins. The accepted cost-benefit analysis shows “regional parks and trails” getting $651,782 from new tax revenue over 25 years. The Children’s Service Fund will reap $3.35M, and regional transit rakes in a whopping $6.7M! These are all $0 today. The lie is that a new big box will magically increase total regional spending on housewares. It won’t.

This story isn’t exactly a parallel to the City of St. Louis riverfront, the city’s Mill Creek Valley, Pruitt-Igoe, the Interstate highways, or Carrollton. Richmond Heights sorta gave residential infill a try, but the arc of suburban development bends toward retail. Short of willfully dedicating itself first and foremost to housing preservation, the municipality’s options all funneled to this outcome.

I hear, and understand, those saying “glad it’s over”, “thank goodness the blight is gone”, and “goodbye eyesore”. Residents and passersby alike are fatigued, and the outcome has been little in doubt for years. Throughout the developers and plans, the inevitability remained. But beyond rationalizing the process lies something more. The images here can suggest it, but if you get a chance, visit before the physical remnants of a community are extinguished for good.

About Alex Ihnen

Alex is the owner and editor of nextSTL.com. He earned a B.A. in Journalism and Masters in Public Affairs at Indiana University and has studied in Adelaide, Australia and Perugia, Italy. Alex can be found on Twitter @alexihnen and reached at alex@nextstl.com

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I think it is a shame to tear down a whole neighborhood, many of my schoolmates lived in that area as children. It is also a shame to me to see another hardware store go up, I know Menards is “different” but in the end still a hardware store. I just hope the residents of the homes were able to relocate to a place where they will be comfortable.

John

Between this, the previous Wal-Mart/Lowe’s razings, and the more recent loss of homes near the Sunnen Metrolink station, how many hundreds of centrally located homes have been lost? What’s the point of all the new stores if no one still lives in the area to use them? Some of those stores could have easily taken up residence in the then-empty Deer Creek Plaza or STL Marketplace, which already had Sam’s. Stupid.

Tom of the Missouri

I wish your Nextl blog had been around when they demolished my perfectly good half million dollar home and the almost identical homes of my 10 next door neighbors in the former Haddington Ct. in Clayton for a dog park a few short years ago.. They were able to keep the whole thing secret, even to residents of Clayton, until it was over. It would have been quite a story for Nexstl.

I enjoyed the Richmond Height’s ruin porn. It is our very own version of Detroit ruin porn. I also feel it came about by similar reasons, namely greed and too much power in government.

In Richmond Heights it is a tragedy how the city officials let those home owners twisting in the wind at the end of a rope for a decade while they implemented their various failed plans to steal their homes. As I learned in Clayton while hanging subject to a buyout you can no longer sell your home to a normal buyer and you are afraid to invest in upkeep or improvement because you rightly fear you will never get that investment back. The result is a gradual slip into decay for the whole neighborhood while the city officials that caused it live comfortably in their non “blighted” neighborhoods. They care little that their greed for more city revenue for such things as a new city hall and new rec center, puts your life on hold for a decade keeping your life savings that you can’t liquidate tied up in a failing neighborhood. I don’t think this is what the framers of the constitution meant when they talked about just compensation for public purpose as one of the few exceptions to the violation of one’s property rights.

I expect with a new Menards that even the heavily traveled Hanley Road will not be able to support three home centers. The likely outcome will be that the farther from I-64 weak sister Lowes will go out of business leaving another empty box that produces no revenue resulting in zero change in the total tax revenue for the Richmond Heights/Brentwood/Maplewood area.

dempster holland

As my wife and I drove by there today, we had exactly the same
thought that first to go will be loews. time will tell

Stltimm

While I agree with many of your points, a few things are overlooked. A big part of the this taking a decade and multiple developers, and as pointed out in the article, losing Ikea, was the handful of holdouts. A huge portion of these houses were owned by a combination of the City of Richmond Heights, speculators, non owner occupied houses. And another handful owned by Estates of dead people with multiple heirs further complicating matters. Lawyers came in and tried to join elederly or confused homeowners together to hold out for more money, convincing them this was some sort of lottery and they should hold out for many multiples more. Sorry if u get $250,000 for your 75,000 house (that prob doesn’t meet code and couldn’t even be sold on open market without huge investments in upkeep) plus $50,000 just to physically more that’s not stealing your house.

Chippewa

If you own the house, and you don’t accept money to sell it, it is theft, wether you are “paid” after the fact or not.

Stltimm

?? Dont accept money to sell? There ultimately was no eminent domain used here (and one of the reasons the IKEA project fell thru IKEA will not obtain property under eminent domain)